experts aren't

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This aligns with the Black Swan concept

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and, he notes modestly, my general theory that, except in the rare fields of study that are subject to proof by experiment, most experts are usually wrong, and most experts are even wronger than the average truck driver, and more expertise makes them yet wronger.

EEs are usually right about our electronics, because our stuff has to work.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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John Larkin
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Shrug. A lot of corporate strategy is even worse!

People are people, whether they are in the state sector or private sector.

Ditto software engineers, because that also has to work. (Except for all the counter-examples)

Reply to
Tom Gardner

But at least really bad corporations are killed in the market. There is some experimental verification of corporate strategy.

But corps are no better than dartboards at predicting economic and social trends. Possibly worse.

Stuff that truly doesn't work will get bad reviews on Amazon. I finally got my new TP-Link giant-antenna wi-fi box to work; I almost gave up and trashed them on Amazon. The instructions are awful.

Buggy stuff gets field feedback, or terrible reviews, and the worst bugs usually get fixed. That's one sorta good thing about the internet... widespread public reviews, and bug fix hints.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

Would the non-John Larkin expert who's ever right about anything please stand up?

Well. Glad that's settled

Reply to
bitrex

For sure economists are notorious for making totally inaccurate predictions; financial pundits in general are, in fact usually wrong, especially the further out they're attempting to see. The joke is they have the chutzpah to assume no one will notice and they can get away with their old nonsense again and again and again.

Reply to
Cursitor Doom

I take it you are and *expert* on this expert theory?

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Rick C
Reply to
rickman

Good thing electronic companies never have any financial failures.

Too bad the review and fix thing doesn't seem to work for logical thinking.

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Rick C
Reply to
rickman

True:

Trump Airlines Trump Vodka Trump Steaks Trump University Trump Mortgage Trump Casinos Trump Magazine GoTrump.com Trump Ice The New Jersey Generals Tour de Trump Trump On The Ocean The Trump Network Trumped! (talk radio)

I'd have to agree, certainly, if the 'businessman' cited above is involved.

A popular expression in the repair industry is "Don't let the magic smoke out".

John

Reply to
John Robertson

If they are usually wrong, that's as good as being usually right, but as a contrarian indicator. You can make a lot of money in the stock market when the correlation coefficient is negative. As long as it's not zero. :)

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Rick C
Reply to
rickman

As I said below :)

I wish! If only!

Read

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for light entertainment, or comp.risks (*everybody* should read that because of its high signal to noise ratio over the decades)

Reply to
Tom Gardner

No, the Internet is not a fix for logical thinking. Evidence, Twitter, FaceBook and the Democratic Party.

Reply to
krw

Kinda like climatologists.

Reply to
krw

When designing things, I try to assume that I'm wrong as much as possible. The alternatitive is to invent some klunky architecture and shift asap into implememtation mode. Many people dislike uncertainty, so get the creative phase over as soon as they can. We like to wallow in confusion for a while at the start of a project.

We have a 10-layer board that's almost done, and it just ocurred to us

- duh - that an octal DAC and some traces and resistors could really open up possibilities. I've got to go in on Monday and tell the layout guy.

You should read the book. The guy thinks all over the place and is very funny.

This is typical:

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The book is full of great observations.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

s_not/

Not entirely. Nicolas Nassim Taleb used the term to describe things that ex ist but haven't been registered. Ground-breaking research is looking for ex actly that kind of Black Swan. The Register is complaining that the researc hers are looking in the right place, mainly by ignoring those researchers w ho have found their Black Swans.

an

Most fields of scientific study are subject to proof by experiment, though in the observational sciences this involves going out and looking for the e ffect that the theory predicts. Astronomy is a purely observational science , but they have extended the kind of things they look at a great deal. My f avourite is astroseismology - finding out about the internal structure of s tars by looking at the vibrations of their surfaces.

Most experts - here John Larkin means climate scientists - don't agree with the misinformation that John Larkin gets from the Murdoch media. John Lark in is the gullible twit here, but his egomania prevents him from recognisin g this obvious fact.

Happily John Larkin is wrong here, but it's not his expertise that's making him wrong, but rather his lack of it.

John Larkin is terrified of getting special purpose transformers wound. Thi s doesn't mean that his stuff doesn't work, but it can mean that it doesn't work as well as it might, or be as cheap as it could be.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

The American car industry is still there, despite a depressing lack of enthusiasm for making compact cars, and a depressing tendency to make them progressively bigger when they did make them.

Unlikely.

But quite few of the bad reviews are posted by people who haven't got a clue about what they are doing. They aren't experts, and the typical problem is that they had a bad theory about what's going on and keep on doing the wrong thing in consequence.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Cursitor Doom hasn't noticed that there are lot of different financial expe rts making lots of different predictions. Obviously, some of them are alway s wrong some of the time.

As a Mail reader, Cursitor Doom won't have had the pleasure of reading Will Hutton in the Guardian in the 1980's, where Thatcher's tame monetarists in the Treasury kept on making predictions that looked silly to the Keynesian s at Oxbridge, and Hutton had fun contrasting the Treasury predictions with the Keynesian forecasts, and even more fun writing an "I told you so piece " six months later.

The real problem with economics is that the fats cats thrive on boom and bu st, and love economists who claim that this is natural and unavoidable.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

h

Sure. Climatologists have to cope with denialist propaganda, which is paid for by people who want to keep on making money out of digging up fossil car bon and burning it as fuel.

Economists who know what they are talking about - and can smooth out booms and busts - have to deal with fat cats with a vested interest in seeing the economy go bust from time to time, who subsidise economists whose silly id eas lead to these convenient (and - for the fat cats - profitable) disaster s.

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There's no kind of fake expert that somebody can't make money out of. John Larkin simply isn't well-enough informed to know when he is being conned.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Yes. Nonlinear, chaotic systems can't be predicted. Chaos can be overall, like in high turbulent fluid flow, but it can also manifest as quiet stretches with occasional extreme events.

Expert groupthink freezes out progress and lets stresses build up, until something snaps.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

Circular reasoning: a corporate failure means 'it was bad', and conclude that nothing was lost. The Roman Empire failed, and LOTS was lost for many centuries. Social Darwinism is another dead theory with similarly dismal predictive value.

Reply to
whit3rd

Interesting how John's theory is exactly the subject of itself. He has formed an opinion based on limited observations with a total inability to experiment. How long before his theory is shown to be BS? Is there a way to calculate a half life? Something like an LD50 maybe?

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Rick C
Reply to
rickman

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